African-American with a Ph.D. to join the armed forces, and his tenacity and knowledge had paved the way for many more. “We’ve confirmed the two cases were caused by the same virus,” he said, consulting his folder. “The first victim was Elsie Hughes in Austin, Texas: female, age thirty-seven, employed in the accounting profession. She contracted the virus through licking a contaminated envelope at her local bank on May twelfth. She died four days later.
“The second victim was Robert English: male, forty-six years of age, resident of San Diego, California. He was a selfemployed computer programmer. The virus was found on postage stamps in his home office. One stamp was missing from the package of ten. We can’t be as sure of the exact date when English was infected, but we suspect on or about the seventh of July. He died on the tenth.”
“What about the virus?” Rothery asked tersely.
“It’s a virus that causes a hemorrhagic fever. To date, there are only two known hemorrhagic viruses, the most well known being Ebola. The other is Marburg. This one is neither.”
“So we’re dealing with an entirely new virus. And a deadly one.”
Henning took a sip of water and a deep breath. “Deadly is a gross understatement, Mr. Under Secretary,” he said. “This virus, if let loose inside our borders on any significant scale, would be absolutely catastrophic. It is communicable, terminal, and we do not have a cure.”
“Where the hell did this virus come from?” Rothery asked.
Henning shrugged.“No idea. I’ve checked with every government facility from Fort Detrick to Plum Island, but no one has been working on developing a new strain of hemorrhagic virus. This didn’t come from any of our labs.”
“Have we got ourselves another anthrax-type situation here?” he asked.
“I have no idea who is behind this, sir, just what kind of virus it is.”
Rothery turned to the man beside him.“Jim, what’s your take on this?”
Jim Allenby, Special Agent in Charge for the FBI out of the Washington, D.C., office, consulted his file. He was a lifer with the Bureau, six years from full pension. His face, like his body, was still lean, but taking on the vestiges of age: Small jowls were forming and the skin under his chin was sagging slightly. But his mind was as sharp as or sharper than when he had first joined the Bureau as a young recruit, wet behind the ears. His hair was graying, and age lines were forming on his forehead and at the edges of his intense blue eyes. “When we had Elsie Hughes’s body shipped to Fort Detrick,” he said, “we suspected we had some sort of hemorrhagic virus. We traced her movements for the week preceding her death and found the envelope in the recycling trash at the bank. We forwarded that envelope ahead to Dr. Henning after it had been initially screened at Fort Detrick. We took the same procedure with the stamps we found in Mr. English’s house. The two attacks, being so separate from each other with respect to geography and method of contamination, lead us to suspect some sort of conspiracy.”
“Terrorists?”
“It’s a definite possibility, Mr. Under Secretary. They could be testing the proverbial waters to see if there’s any collateral damage or if only the primary infected target dies. They may want to know how many strikes are necessary to infect our population before unleashing the main attack. Or they may be willing to play a game of terror by paralysis. If the news were to seep out that items we take for granted, like stamps, could be infected, panic would be sure to follow. And with that panic will come a huge blow to how efficiently we run the country. It could easily outstrip the anthrax scare of 2003.”
“So where did this virus come from? How is it possible that a new hemorrhagic virus just suddenly shows up? How was it created?” Rothery asked the pathologist.
“You’re sure you want an answer to that? It’s pretty technical.”
“Try me.”
“I suspect that some group has developed it by mutating Ebola or Marburg,” Henning answered. “But that said, the manner in which this virus binds to the host cell is quite different from Ebola or Marburg. We’ve isolated a unique set of proteins on the outer viral membrane, which we think are targeting chemokine receptors for the bonding process. But how it enters the host cell is a complete mystery at this point. Once it’s inside the victim, at the human cellular level, it uncoats and its nucleic acid undergoes transcription into mRNAs. Genome replication follows, which is standard, except we suspect it’s a DNA virus that uses only the de novo pathway and somehow does not require the salvage pathway.” He stopped for a moment to let the string of technical jargon sink in, then addressed Rothery’s question. “So how was it created? We’re not sure. There’s still a lot about the virus we don’t understand.”
Rothery rubbed his forehead. “Why? Why would they bother to create a new virus? Why not just use Ebola?”
“Ebola is unpredictable and incredibly dangerous. I’m running tests on the virus we found in Hughes and English to see if whoever mutated this thing mellowed it a bit, but that’s not overnight work. It’s going to take a lot of tests to find out those differences.”
“What extent of damage could this cause if the wrong people are controlling it? Give me an educated guess, Dr. Henning,” Rothery said.
He was pensive, choosing his words carefully.“If I was in their shoes and my intentions were to unleash a virus on the United States, I’d want one that was controllable until I released it. After that, maximum destruction. Easily spread through contact, possibly even aerosol contamination. I’d look for a fast-acting bug with ugly symptoms and no known cure. And so far, from what I’ve seen, they’ve got check marks next to most of those. And if they have enough of the virus and the manpower to spread it quickly when they actually start, I’d say we could see deaths numbering into the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. And very quickly-within days, not weeks.”
“Jesus Christ,” Rothery snapped. He turned to his FBI counterpart. “Jim, what have you guys got on any groups acting inside our borders that may have this technology and the facilities necessary to develop and store the virus?”
Allenby glanced quickly at his files. “A handful of possibilities, J. D. I’ll get entire dossiers on each one to your department by end of work today. We’ll be approaching this problem with total interdepartmental cooperation. Anything you need, just ask.”
Rothery nodded his approval. “Thanks, Jim. What’s going on outside our borders, Craig?”
Craig Simms, Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been quiet, assimilating information. He was a thoughtful, academic man with intelligent gray eyes and a full head of silver hair that matched his eyes perfectly. He was a veteran of the espionage community, and his knowledge of terrorist cells operating worldwide was renowned. He shifted his gaze to the people at the table as he spoke, ignoring the thick file he had brought with him to the meeting.
“We have identified twenty-seven possible locations in nine countries where there is what we consider to be the right mixture of personnel and facilities. There are thousands of buildings that could be used to create and breed this virus, but only a few molecular biologists that would have the expertise and hate the United States enough to actually do it. We’ve spent the last few weeks tracking these experts and we know where most of them are. Getting into some of these labs will be easy; others will be next to impossible, but we’re ready to begin covert ops if necessary. Seventeen of the labs are in countries where our operatives can move about in relative anonymity, but the other ten are in very hostile territory. At present, we’re using satellites to watch every vehicle that leaves these labs and we’re trying to intercept them whenever possible. We’ve had some success, but to date we haven’t found anything that resembles this virus.”
“What about the seventeen labs you could gain access to?” Rothery asked. “Have you done anything about that yet?”
“You mean have we sent in operatives to terminate operations?”
“Yes.”
“No. We suspect at least twelve of these labs are al-Qaeda, and we’ve been monitoring them, trying to identify al-Qaeda members as they come and go. It’s working very well. We’d rather not go busting down their doors and lose the information trail we’ve spent months, sometimes years, putting in place.”
“But if you had to…”
“If we had to, we would cooperate, Mr. Under Secretary,” Simms said evenly. “But let’s try to keep that avenue as a last resort. Identifying al-Qaeda operatives is our top priority right now, and I’d hate to lose what we’ve worked so hard to put in place.”
